BJP labels Miliband visit a ‘diplomatic disaster’

New Delhi, Jan 16 (IANS) The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Friday described the visit of British Foreign Secretary David Miliband as a “diplomatic disaster” and stated that he spoke the language of Pakistan on the 60-hour Mumbai terror attack.”His visit was pro-Pakistan and pro-Rahul (Gandhi). Miliband by his utterances endorsed Islamabad’s stance on the Mumbai attack and that too from the Indian soil,” BJP general secretary Arun Jaitley told reporters here.

He was critical of Miliband spending two days in Congress general secretary Rahul Gandhi’s constituency Amethi and “then making such statements”.

He said for the last 52 days, India had mounted international pressure to get Pakistan to cooperate in the investigations in the terror attack but there was no result. “Miliband spoke in the same language as (former Pakistan president) Musharraf used to,” he said.

The BJP leader also expressed his surprise that India was now willing to let Pakistan investigate and try the perpetrators of the heinous attack.

“The president of that country entrusted the inquiry into the assassination of Benazir Bhutto to Scotland Yard for it cannot trust its own agencies. How can we let such a country have the last word on Mumbai?” Jaitley wondered, referring to External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee’s statement to a TV channel Thursday that if it was not possible for Pakistan to hand over the fugitives to India “there should at least be a fair trial in Pakistan”.

However, on Friday, Mukherjee said the “perpetrators must face Indian justice”.

Miliband had triggered controversy by linking the Mumbai attack with the unresolved Kashmir issue in an article Thursday in Britain’s The Guardian newspaper. Later, in a media interaction in Delhi, he also sought to claim that the terror attack was not carried out by the Pakistani state.

He wrote that the “war on terror” was “misleading and mistaken” because it failed to take into account the different motives of various terror groups.

Miliband said: “Resolution of the dispute over Kashmir would help deny extremists in the region one of their main calls to arms, and allow Pakistani authorities to focus more effectively on tackling the threat on their western borders.”